Talented Cate Blanchett is also great company

'P olitics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business." — Paul Valery. But we are not talking politics today. Indeed, I find very few people talking politics, Washington or disaster because they are so very weary and tired of it!

So, how about being invited to a lunch at the charming Le Cirque's newly decorated upper room with its orange overtones? There, I found myself seated between Cate Blanchett, the great Australian actress, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the great American actor.

It was all exposure for the sake of Cate's perhaps winning a future Oscar for her magnificent work in Woody Allen's latest film "Blue Jasmine."

I also got to sit part time with Cate's co-star, Bobby Cannavale, who is one of the most talented actors around and somebody who everybody seems to adore. (I concur — and if you hate him, I'll be shocked to hear from you.) He does a fabulous turn in "Blue Jasmine" as a nicer, weepier and friendlier Marlon Brando type.

I had a wonderful time chatting with Cate and Philip.

I had known them both in what are now called "the beginnings" of their amazing careers — accomplished not through publicity, but through their own incredible talents. Cate is one of the civilized people of the world, a wonderfully interested conversationalist, beautiful in a pale blonde manner, as though she has never stepped out into the sun. We had fun speaking of our former hero, Katharine Hepburn, whom Cate played to an Oscar win in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie "The Aviator."

Cate was interested in what has happened to Hepburn's family home in Fenwick, Conn., and I was able to tell her that the old house had been boosted about five feet above ground to avoid rising water and beautifully redone by developer Frank Sciame.

It boasts beautiful photographs of Kate in almost every room. This fateful place in Fenwick, overlooking Long Island Sound, was on the market from Sotheby's for approximately $30 million this past summer.

There are adjoining grounds and it is a stunning place. Mr. Sciame pulled it off the market in July and says he'll use it as a summer home.